


Imperfections: Las Vegas

by Dasha (Dasha_mte)



Series: Imperfections [13]
Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 07:55:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22492654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dasha_mte/pseuds/Dasha
Summary: Who had five sentinels in the same department? Nobody but Los Vegas could even have afforded it.
Series: Imperfections [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/6682
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	1. Part 1

Chapter One

May, 1996

Part 1: Nick

The brakes on Sara's SUV squeaked at about fifteen kilohertz. Nick heard it behind him when he was just inches from the door to the Western States Historical Society. Busted. He turned around and set himself to wait patiently. By the time Grissom and Sara made it to the door, he was a model of patience and laid-back professionalism.

Grissom motioned Sara on ahead. "We'll be right in," he said.

Hoping to forestall another lecture, Nick said quickly, "I wasn't going to start. I knew somebody was right behind me."

He should have known better than to try to snow Grissom, who just sighed and said, "I know you think you're invulnerable. I don't have a problem with that. You don't have to admit you need a guide. But you do have to use one. When you get caught working a crime scene alone, it's not going to be your ass they come for. It'll be mine."

He didn't think he was invulnerable, although Grissom had accused him of that more than once. There was no point in arguing that, though. "I understand that, really, I do--"

"I hope so, Nick. Because when the mess hits the fan about this, I will make sure it rolls down hill."

Nick wondered if there was a point to the mixed metaphor--because Grissom's communication was never imprecise--and followed his boss inside. "Speaking of guides, where's whatshisname?"

"Holly had a root canal this afternoon. She's taking tonight off, so I loaned Cory to Katherine."

Cory, right. How could you forget a name like that? This latest kid assigned to Grissom was so green you practically had to mow him. "You 'loaned' Cory? Guides are not interchangeable."

"They are if they're competent. Where's the body?"

The body was in the basement, behind a locked cage. She was female, reeking of distress and waste. The entire room stank of sickness. This was likely not a homicide at all. Nick paced the room while Sara unpacked the kit and Grissom focused on the body, speculating on illnesses that might have caused a gruesome and sudden collapse.

There was a witness: weird and twitchy, but a witness. It was already clear that he wouldn't be much help. Nick would have guessed decreased intelligence or some kind of neurological disorder, but Grissom questioned him in detail anyway.

"So, what's the deal? Is he retarded? According to O'Riley this guy's body language says he's guilty."

"I think he's autistic."

Well, that was a new one. "Autistic? You mean like Rain Man?"

"Rain Man was a savant. Extremely rare. Aaron Pratt is a high-functioning autistic man with superior right-brain ability."

"Kind of sounds like you."

As usual, Grissom had no sense of humor. "Current research suggests he's a lot more like us than you think. Print everything. I want to take a look at the bathroom."

Part 2: Greg

It was beautiful.

It was large, huge, in fact. Lumpy and uneven, unless you knew how to look at it. It wasn't anything that belonged in a human body. It wasn't quite like anything Greg had seen before, at least not up close in person. He'd seen drawings of similar structures before.

He raised the magnification on the microscope and considered staining it different colors. Dimly, he felt Shondra pat him on the shoulder and ask if he wanted to join her for a break. Deep down, she was more chemist than guide, but Shondra didn't have much of an attention span. There was only so much time she'd spend admiring a globular protein. Greg grunted his refusal and checked the spectral results. Nada. Not only strange and wonderful, but mysterious.

He didn't hear Shondra leave, or even notice that she was gone until Nick came in.

"Got anything?" Nick asked.

"You ever see the attack of the killer tomatoes? Cause there's something in the victim's blood that looks like one of those heirlooms." He lifted one of the imaging print-outs and passed it over.

Nick glanced at the paper. "No use pulling a spectral. That's not a chemical."

"No....It's a large, ugly, globular mass." It was very large and strange. Kind of entrancing. Ugly, but weirdly ugly, not boringly ugly. "It's probably a protein, something that large...."

"Huh. Well it's foreign. How did it get in there?"

"Cart before the horse, Nick. First you identify it, then you figure out where it came from."

Reluctantly, Greg turned away from the riveting image and rummaged for a reference book. A couple of possibilities were starting to coalesce.

"I always thought you kept your porn in there," Nick teased, pointing at the cabinet Greg was searching through. Shondra had tidied things up again. Greg could never find things after she got fed up with his carefully arranged chaos.

"I move it around." Greg dropped a book onto the counter and began to flip through the pages. "Okay, now, this is a 66-kilodalton globular protein, composed of two disulfide-linked sub-units, A and B. Okay, yeah. This is a plant protein. Here, look," he shoved the open book toward Nick.

"So...it's a plant?"

"Right. A lectin. It binds to sugars." He pulled the book back and flipped over to the next page. He sucked in a horrified breath. "Damn. This is nasty. It's ricin, a biotoxin."

Nick gaped. "Biotoxin?"

"Yeah. B chain binds to glycoside residues which trigger endocytotic uptake of the--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop now! Biotoxin? As in anthrax? As in smallpox?" Nick took a stumbling step backwards. "I was at that crime scene for hours. I was all over it. Oh, my god."

Greg had never smelled raw panic on Nick before. The wave of musky terror was so sharp that he had to take a step back himself. "Relax, man. It takes, like, two hours for ricin symptoms to show and, like, 48 more to kill you. You were there yesterday, right? You would already--"

"What symptoms? Oh, Damn--"

"Um," Not wanting to rely on his memory when Nick was right here panicking, Greg checked the page number and flipped to the list of symptoms, "Sweats. Cramps."

Nick gulped and shook his head.

"Convulsions?

"Convulsions?" Nick squeaked. His headshake was as likely to be an expression of ray horror as 'no.' "Convulsions?"

Well, crap. Nick had backed into a corner and was nearly hyperventilating. Greg started toward him, reconsidered, and bellowed for a guide. "Sara!" He stuck his head out the door, but the hall was empty except for Grissom, about to turn the corner and disappear. "Hey. Grissom!"

He didn't turn around. Zoning again. It wasn't the first time. Spurred on by the panic behind him, Greg stomped solidly on the floor. That usually got Grissom's attention when yelling didn't work.

Grissom turned around.

"Hey, some help here?" Greg called. "I need a guide."

Grissom could move _fast_ when he wanted to. "What's going on?" he asked as he pushed past Greg and entered the lab.

"He's freaking out over a contaminant at a crime scene. I mean, it's not like he was exposed. He would have already been showing symptoms. And, anyway, you were there too--"

"Nick?" Grissom prodded quietly.

"We are so screwed," Nick squeaked.

"You follow the rules, Nicky?" Grissom stopped approaching when Nick backed up. "You touch anything at the scene with your bare hands? You taste any of the evidence?"

It was Grissom's very stern, paternal voice. Nick promptly defended himself, the first distraction from the panic; it was a neat trick. "Of course, not."

"Of course, not," Grissom agreed evenly. He turned to look back at Greg. "What's the contaminant?"

"Ricin," Greg said.

Grissom closed the remaining distance between himself and Nick. "You'd already be showing symptoms, if you'd been exposed. So would I." His voice was steady and quiet, almost hypnotic. "Your color's fine. Your eyes are tracking. You don't smell sick. Do you remember how she smelled, Nicky? I don't smell that here."

"I'm sweating."

"You're panicking. The power of suggestion. Dangerous on its own, by the way. And you know better."

Greg felt himself relaxing. Grissom wasn't Nick's regular guide, but he was completely unflappable, and he knew what he was doing. Hell, he knew what everybody else was doing. They might have avoided a disaster here.

"You're fine, Nick. This isn't like you. Find your center, and get back to work."

Greg glanced at the microscope with its slide of biotoxin. He wondered what ricin smelled like. The text hadn't specified whether normals or sentinels could detect it. Even if it had an odor, the tiny amount in the lab was *probably* below threshold.

Realizing what he was doing, Greg stumbled out into the hall. Damn. You didn't go looking for something like that, not straining to find minute quantities that might not be there. If it _was_ present, the affect would be magnified....

In the lab, Grissom was still doing the guide thing with Nick. Patient. Gentle. Unrelenting. "Data, Nick. What does the evidence tell you? Pay attention to what you perceive, not what you fear. We weren't exposed. We didn't notice a toxin in the room. What does that tell us?"

"We have to look somewhere else."

Part 3: Gil

Grissom's latest guide was energetic and dedicated. He had also completely bought into the fashionable nonsense about guides having to _care_. His name was Cory, and Cory cared. A lot. Sitting solemnly beside Grissom's desk, he was doing his best to make sure that Grissom knew it: "I know that if it was just a matter of knowledge, I'd be completely useless. You don't need a guide in a lot of ways. I get that, Gil. But I am here to help. So why don't you tell me what's wrong and what we can do about it."

If Grissom had been in a better frame of mind, he might have laughed at this carefully executed and earnest kindness. "Nothing's wrong. Why don't you run down to the lab and see if Greg is finished with the Crane report?"

He had to give the kid a little credit. Most of the guides Grissom had trained had very quickly learned not to argue with him. This one just leaned forward patiently and patted his arm. "You're distracted. You aren't focusing. You've been having trouble following even short conversations all night--"

Grissom raised a hand to cut the kid off.

Stubbornly, Cory continued, "Don't tell me you're zoning. You're aware of everything when you zone. Something's wrong, and I think you know that. Let me help you!"

What stopped Grissom from explaining to earnest and dedicated Cory that it _was_ a matter of knowledge (And experience. And raw talent. And that Cory was years away from being knowledgeable enough and skilled enough to argue with Grissom--raw talent remained to be seen) and that graduate or not Cory was still a trainee...

What stopped him from explaining all that was that the kid smelled of honest worry. And so maybe there was something to this fluffyy-bunny guide attachment crap, because guide feelings apparently _could_ function as a kind of emotional blackmail. Instead of reaming the kid out, Grissom told him the truth. "I'm not distracted. I'm not sick. I'm not having cognition problems. My hearing is at about ten percent today. You can't get my attention because I can't hear you."

Cory blinked. He had, of course, seen Grissom's medical records. He knew about the otosclerosis. Mentioning it was unpleasant, but at least it would bring this conversation to a close. Hearing degeneration was a topic not open to discussion. Neither was the ongoing dispute between the HMO, the hospital, and the lawyers about the liability involved in undertaking elective surgery on a sentinel. Shoulders dropping slightly, Cory began to back off. He didn't finish the gesture. Unfortunately. "Ten percent of your normal, or ten percent of average normal?"

Ordinarily, Grissom would have approved. As a guide, Cory was doing exactly the right thing. As a guide, there were things he needed to know. Personally... Grissom wished he was more of a wimp. "Ten percent of average. I've lost almost all of the lower register," he said levelly.

"Are you all right otherwise? Vertigo? Headache?"

"I'm Fine."

Cory seemed prepared to accept that. Possibly because Grissom had been so forthcoming.

"Now. Since that is settled, would you please go down to the lab and--" The phone rang. "Get that, would you?"

Cory listened. The only thing he said was "Right away." Grissom could smell the adrenalin spiking as he hung up. "There's been an emergency at the morgue. Some kind of unknown contaminant. Catherine and Dr. Robbins are both affected. Holly has ordered the area sealed off and she has both of them in the shower, but you're the guide of record for--"

Grissom didn't wait for the rest. He could feel the air shift just behind him as Cory tried to keep up. He'd better be quick. Grissom wouldn't hold the elevator for him. They'd had Ricin in the lab just last week. As careful as they were with safety protocols, it was still pretty much down to luck that nobody had gotten hurt.

The main doors to the pathology labs were blocked off, and a hazmat team was already arriving. Here, at last, Grissom felt uncertain. He wished to hell his hearing was on line. He didn't want to open up smell to track them with that, not with an unknown contaminant around. He was turning around to tell Cory to call Holly's phone when Holly herself poked her head out of the records room and motioned him over.

Her hair was dripping wet. She was bare-footed, dressed in oversized scrubs. Behind her, Grissom could see Catherine in the dim corner of the file room, hunched in a chair. "We don't know what it was," Holly spoke very fast, but her enunciation was perfect, and he had no problem following. "It was _in_ the body, apparently. Dr. Robins opened an incision and they both--" she took a step closer, the smell of her fear sharp and unpleasant in his nostrils. "I've never seen a reaction that bad. Katherine couldn't _stop_ throwing up. The Doc curled into a ball on the floor."

Grissom stopped her right there. Panic wasn't helping. "Where is he now?"

She pointed across the hall. "Still in decon. As soon as we were done, he demanded a clean set of scrubs and ordered us all out. He says to leave him alone."

That was a good sign. "Were there any neurological symptoms?"

"Their control is shot, both of them. But no seizers. No hallucinations. No motor problems."

"Uptake distortion?"

Holly frowned, brushed her hair out of her eyes, took a deep breath. "Both of them at once?" at last she stopped stalling and said doubtfully.

"It happens."

"When Catherine miss-reacts, she either gets manic or sort-of-unconscious. Not...this. And I haven't seen Dr. Robbins' history, but I have seen him handle all kinds of crap and--nothing. Nothing gets to him."

Grissom nodded. "You're going with poisoning, then?"

She hesitated, and Grissom resisted the urge to shout. He did not have time for indecision. "I was practically standing between them. If it were a toxin--for them both to be hit so hard, I should be feeling something."

"Sentinels don't just get hit harder. Sometimes they get hit faster. Call Sara. Tell her I want blood from both of you, and put a rush on it. Then, I want you both observed for the next twenty-four hours."

"You're not ordering the emergency room?" she asked.

"When I don't know what it is?" He was already backing away. "Chances are the exposure is so small it's undetectable. What could they do? If the symptoms are under control, there's nothing to treat, and the stress of an emergency room visit...but the bottom line is, you're Catherine's guide, Holly. It's your call. Is she stable?"

"She has no sensory control, but no physical symptoms, either. I'll take her home, I guess. Or ask Sara to give us a ride...."

He turned away and stalked across the hall. Catherine would be safe in the hands of her guide. "Albert, it's me." He waited till the count of three to open the door. He wouldn't have heard the invitation to come in and he wouldn't have accepted a refusal, but it was polite to give a warning.

The lights were off. Grissom quickly shut the door and didn't touch the switch. The thin line of light coming under the door was more than enough to see by. The room itself was small; tile on the walls and floor, two open shower stalls, a bench, a huge sink, an eyewash station. Albert had withdrawn to the far side of the room, hunched in a desk chair. Like Katherine, he was in scrubs, his hair still wet. Risking secondary contamination, Grissom took a cautious sniff. He smelled the antiseptic tang of non-toxic cleaner...non-reactive soap...clean linens...and under that, salt, urea, adrenalin, cortosol: apocrine sweat. They had had a hard time. "Albert?"

Robbins pawed at his face with one hand while waving Grissom off with the other. If he answered, it was behind his hand and too softly to hear.

Slowly, telegraphing his movements, he stepped forward. "I'm coming over," he whispered.

"I'm fine. I'll go home and sleep this off. Call Cheryl, she'll give me a ride....No, her car's in the shop. Well, we're shut down for the night anyway. It's all quarantined. I'll get a ride from one of the techs...." he was coherent. Not quick or sharp, but lucid at least.

"You're clean, Al. It's all right. Let me do my job."

No answer.

"Why don't you tell me how you're doing?"

"I'm fine."

"Headache," Grissom said levelly. "Photophobia."

"Common enough for sentinels," he whispered.

"Not common for you." Slowly, silently daring him to admit he couldn't handle the contact, Grissom reached out and firmly grasped Al's arm. The skin was clammy. The delicate hydraulics beneath too dramatic. Al's body was laboring, and the threat of it jumped through the contact, but Grissom pushed his subjective response aside. "Hypertension. Tachycardia." He continued evenly--diagnosis by touch. Most of the people Grissom touched were dead, but there were some skills that didn't fade with disuse. He shifted his hand to the shoulder, the abdomen, the back of the neck. "Nausea. Dyspnea. That's a rash on your hands."

"Gil. Leave me alone."

"Irritability." He leaned forward and sniffed. "Probably from pain, which you aren't managing at all."

"I don't need a guide."

"All right," Gil said reasonably. "How about a ride to the hospital?"

That made him flinch and pull away. "Do I have a choice?" he asked bitterly. "Or are you just pulling rank?"

"As long as you seem to be thinking clearly, you have a choice."

This, finally, earned him a flash of bitter amusement, the first sign of real strength he had seen. "How am I doing so far?"

Grissom shrugged and snared a stool with his toe, pulling it forward so that he could sit beside the tile wall, close to Al's body. "Give me an analysis of your situation."

"Hypertension. Tachycardia. Nausea. Dyspnea. Irritability. Rash. Difficulty concentrating."

Grissom sighed inwardly. Al might be feeling the strain, but he was still sharp and present. He had to find a way to work with him, because there was no working against him. "What can I do to help?"

For a long moment Al considered Grissom sourly, then he held out his hand. "If you really want to help," he said.

Grissom reached back at once. Al had large, agile hands. His grip was good, another sign the exposure wasn't causing neurological problems. He held on firmly, head bowed, attitude listening. "An old doctor's trick," Grissom said, impressed. He'd never seen this one, not personally. Most sentinel doctors couldn't manage it. Zoning on a patient, synchronizing bodies with them, gave a very complete picture of symptoms. It was also dangerous. The synchronization could easily get out of hand, become too complete, making the symptoms, in effect, contagious. Control had to be perfect. In this case, though, Al was counting on things getting out of hand. He wanted an overwhelming zone, to lose himself in a sentinel whose physiology was even and steady.

Through the contact, Grissom could feel Al's heart pounding. Fast. Strong and even, but fast. This close, the rushing blood was a torrent. Too fast. Too hard.

Muscle tension. Al was tight, almost shaking.

The tide of breath. Fast. Shallow. The faint wheeze Grissom couldn't hear...shimmered and stuttered, buzzed through his hands.

"Don't," Al said. "I'm resetting off you, not the other way around."

Good point. Grissom took a deep breath, set his feet, rolled his shoulders. For the next little bit, all he had to do was sit here. Calmly. He breathed again, the mindful breath, although he didn't enjoy meditation. Against his hands, Albert eased fractionally. Already he had matched breaths. The rapid heart rate was slowing.

Normally, Robbins didn't need much in the way of guiding. OSHA compliance required him to have a guide available, but he didn't normally go into the field, and he had the skills and experience to manage his senses himself without help. While he liked guides all right socially, as human beings, he didn't like working with them. Grissom had been a compromise. Close enough to be handy in case of emergency, busy enough not to fuss, he wasn't a distraction. A sentinel himself, Grissom could stop in a couple of times a day and use his own senses to verify that everything was all right. It was unusual, and if Al hadn't been his own department head they might never have gotten it cleared. As it was, the (barely legal) arrangement worked very well.

The sentinels in Grissom's own department needed much closer supervision. Catherine was fairly high maintenance. A brilliant sentinel, and she did her own documentation (all of it perfect), but she continually battled her senses. She had to be gentled along, calmed and encouraged. Nick had to be practically babysat; without a guide along to watch him, he did stupid and dangerous things without even hesitating. Warrick had great control and he was thorough with details, but without a guide to help him focus, he couldn't put the pieces together. Greg--even with Grissom himself doing the guiding--didn't have the attention span to work in the field. And the current intern, although he had fantastic scores and looked perfect on paper, didn't have the patience to really finish a scene unless guided by a competent CSI who could lead him through it step by step and keep him focused through to the end. Supervising sentinels was like herding cats--And Las Vegas had the best in the country.

But Albert was always a relief to work with. Calm, efficient, organized; a pure joy to watch. He saw the world in details, but smoothly assembled dozens of isolated facts into a single picture. He rarely zoned, and never dangerously. He never lost his bearings, overwhelmed by the input, and had to start over. He never tried to pull prima dona sentinel bull shit. Alone, with no particular effort or mnemonic techniques, Albert could bring his senses up or down. He could focus on one sound out of a hundred. Once, after slicing his arm on a piece of broken glass, he had simply turned off the pain and given himself five sutures. Grissom had arrived when he was half-finished, unnecessary, superfluous, an observer not a guide. In order to satisfy OSHA standards, Grissom was listed as Al's partner, but he had learned much more then he'd taught, and he had never been needed.

Grissom closed his eyes, consciously relaxing, shifting on the seat to get more comfortable. He brought his physiological responses down. Calm. Relaxed. Given a model, Al would follow him. Everything would be fine.

The humid little room was dim enough that, with Grissom's eyes closed and hardly any sound getting through, _nothing_ seemed to exist in the entire world except Albert Robbins. All other smells had been dropped as unimportant, and the warm, human musk that remained was slowly becoming more familiar as the chemicals of distress faded. Body heat, which Grissom almost never noticed except in the line of duty, was radiant on the skin of his face, his arms. Against his hands was all of Al's transmitted tension, the slowing rhythm of his heart, the work he was putting into breathing. At a moment like this, Grissom could understand the growing wave of sentimentality that saw sentinel-guide relationships as mainly emotional and intuitive. It was somehow precious, experiencing a friend like this.

Al's voice was a muffled echo, and Grissom's eyes popped open. "-- ready for you to talk me through it," he was saying. "Help me identify the contaminant."

"No. You don't need to think about that. Let it go."

"Gil, we have to know what it is."

"We will. Holly called in a hazmat team. By now, it's been sampled and spectrographed. Or will be soon. Let it go."

"I don't like it." His blood pressure was close to normal now. His breathing was an even tide. Headache and/or nausea were both still good bets, from the way he was holding his head, though. No doubt Al was sure that would pass. At this stage, he could easily pretend he was fine.

He wasn't. Either he had been poisoned, or he had experienced an uptake-distortion response, which was often more dangerous than an actual toxin. Especially since he clearly wasn't taking it seriously. "Science can do it. There's no point. It's not like you to be wasteful."

"It would save time. They can't have finished yet. We have a case. There's a reason they hire sentinels for this; it's faster. Gil, I can do it."

"No."

"It was _inside_ the body, it's important--"

"Please don't." That earned him a look of surprise. "I can't...After last week with the ricin scare....Please." That admission was honestly painful enough to convince Al that it was true. Biotoxin in his lab, handled by his staff. That still didn't bear thinking about. "If you're okay, I'll take you home."

The answer was a reluctant shrug, most real through the contact rather than sight. "How's Catherine?"

"Holly said she was stable. She was going to take her home."

Al looked at Grissom closely. "You didn't check her yourself? That's not like you. Usually you fuss over your people."

"Of course I don't. What a thing to say--"

"You watch them more closely than the guides on duty do."

Perhaps that was true. But as a sentinel, Grissom _could_ watch his people more closely than the guides assigned to them. It didn't mean anything. "I had a legal responsibility to you. And I didn't know how you were." Grissom didn't usually give Robbins the attention he gave to criminalists in the field. He wasn't a kid. He was never careless. His control was damn near perfect. That he'd been taken by surprise, that he'd been completely overwhelmed, Grissom hadn't been ready for that....'Which one of us am I comforting?' he wondered. "Let's get you out of here," he said.

A hesitation. "Have someone bring your car up to the door. My balance is completely shot."

"Pain?" Grissom asked, though he didn't smell any now.

"Not bad."

Grissom thought about putting a sentinel who was already nauseous and was having balance problems on an elevator.

On prosthetics. And nauseous. With a balance problem. On an elevator.

Bad idea.

Keeping hold of his partner with one hand, Grissom stood up. "I want to try something," he said. He moved around behind, shifting the chair so that he was between Albert and the wall. "You mentioned working with Chakras once, didn't you?" Grissom knew damn well he had. He'd done some research afterward, even though the topic hadn't caught his attention before. A responsible guide was familiar with the modalities his sentinel preferred. Even if he never expected to need it. "I want you to picture your prana for me. Not how it ought to be, how it looks right now."

A single nod.

"Where are the blocks, Al?"

He had to lean forward to see the answer. "Everywhere." Okay, bad news, but the cooperation was swift and unstinting, giving Grissom access to subconscious observations as well as conscious ones. He could work with this.

"Show me the worst block."

With the fingers of his free hand, Albert clawed at the air just below his abdomen. _muladhara, the root chakra, keeps us in the physical world._ Grissom quelled his spike of apprehension. From what he knew of the symbol system, the position indicated that Al's body perceived a threat to survival. "It's all right," he said aloud, although what Al needed was help, not reassurance. Right. Focus. "We'll start at the top. All right?" He held a hand five centimeters above the crown of Albert's head. The tease of body heat would capture his attention better than actual pressure. "There is a vortex of light, here. It should be open, flowing. The color is white, blinding, it's a strong light...." _Each has a color and a vibration._ "It makes a sound, doesn't it, Al? Show me what the sound is supposed to be." Slowly, feeling his way, he assembled a chakra meditation. He forgot one of the Sanskrit names, but he had the colors right. When cued, Albert hummed softly. Grissom could barely hear the sounds, but the vibrations traveled perfectly well through physical contact. His whole body throbbed with the wave forms, in fact. It was a very strange experience.

Grissom hadn't enrolled in the guide program in college in order to get a sentinel of his own. It was the best way to learn about his own senses, and he had been profoundly unwilling to put his life in someone else's hands in ignorance. He'd finished the degree because he realized it would put him in a unique position to supervise sentinels. It had been about self-sufficiency and ambition.

Whispering word pictures to Al in the dim decon shower wasn't like supervising a sentinel in the field. It wasn't like redirecting the focus of a flakey kid or slowing down someone who was feeling overwhelmed by input or teaching zoning sentinel to put the isolated facts together into a single picture. Given the nature of the work, criminalists didn't use a lot of extended visualizations. As far as remediation went, Grissom preferred to handle accidents, spikes, and sensory failures by being careful and making sure they didn't happen in the first place. This was harder.

Careful not to rush, a little distracted by how much free ranging imagination it took to spin a convincing description, Grissom finally made it to the root chakra. "Don't try to force it. Spinning is its natural state. Red is its natural color. You know that. Let it just come naturally."

Albert said something. From the tone it was probably a protest or denial. "You don't have to picture it. Just let it happen." Grissom breathed in, tasting the air. With strangers, smell wasn't the best evidence. There was too much idiosyncratic difference, even if you could document it properly, and usually you couldn't. It was sketchy, asking jurors to believe a sentinel's opinion without documentation. But this wasn't a case. This was Al, and Grissom knew how he smelled when he was well.

Right now...he smelled more like himself than before.

Better, but probably not good enough to get him all the way home. They would have to try something else. "Tamil guides connect their prana with their partners'. Tamil sentinels are the healthiest in the world."

Albert twisted around and looked up. "You don't..." he waved vaguely with his free hand "...do this."

"What _I'm_ doing is using a symbol system you're familiar with to help you control your autonomic responses."

Albert accepted that and turned back, apparently satisfied.

"Picture me, now. My prana. My life resting against yours." Consciously, carefully, Grissom slowed his voice. "Gently. Gently. The separation between us...is gone." Fractionally, Al relaxed backward, his head brushing Grissom's chest. "This may be like what you were doing before, when you were using my physical body as a model. This is a better model. A clearer image. A chance to...let me help you directly." He cringed at how subjective and downright flakey this sounded, but quelled his embarrassment. He should be grateful to have a clear and vivid symbol system to work with.

Grissom felt the inhalation and sigh he couldn't hear. Beneath his hand, tense muscles gave. Right. See? This was working. "No distance between us," he breathed. "Whatever you need...." He wondered how far they should go. Albert's heart rate was well under fifty beats a minute. It was a fine line now. Grissom knew the signs of a pending altered state.

For himself as well. Despite the fact that what he was doing very important, he felt relaxed and completely comfortable. Standing here with one of Albert's hands captured in his own, the back of Albert's head pressed to his chest was...satisfying. Pleasant even. Seductively so. His own pulse was dropping, too. He could feel an easy warmth in his thorax. It spread, rising to an almost painful heat in his hands.

He knew these subjective sensations didn't mean anything. If anything, his own physiological responses were a distraction from what he was supposed to be doing; namely, stabilizing Al enough to get him home so he could rest.

Fighting the growing feeling of distance and fuzziness, he eased around and squatted so that he could look Al in the eye. "How are you doing?"

The answer was flattened and slightly slurred; Al was trancing . "I'm a little scared."

Barely, just barely, Grissom kept his stomach from lurching at that. "Why?" Even controlled, his anxiety did pretty much kill his own happy buzz.

"This doesn't happen to me."

"I know." Al hadn't had an uptake distortion response since starting medical school. His understanding of the chemical properties of the substances he encountered and his amazing accuracy at estimating concentrations had overridden any occasional tendency toward physiological confusion. "You ran into something dangerous. Your body sent off a warning. It's over. It's not happening any more." Al was very suggestible right now. Saying he was fine would make it so. "You're okay." Grissom found himself smiling slightly. "You're also completely blitzed, by the way. I had no idea you tranced this easily. It's time to come back out. Can you do that? Wake up for me, Al."

A slow blink. Another. Slight surprise. "Gil."

"How are you feeling?"

"The best I've felt...in a week, anyway?" He seemed uncertain.

Grissom patted his shoulder. "Wait here. I'm going to see if they've found anything out."

Most of the lights in the hallway were off. Sara was waiting across the hall. She leaned against the wall, her arms folded, her hair drooping forward wearily. She looked up slowly. "How is he?"

"All right, I think. I'm going to take him home. How long--?"

"An hour and a half. Are you all right?"

"Me? Yeah. Fine. Why?" She looked like she didn't know where to start, so he cut her off. "Never mind. What's the word on the contaminant?"

"All they've found so far is some kind of bacterial infection," she said. "Nasty, but no ID on it yet."

"Microbes set them off?"

"Or the waste products produced by the microbes. If they weren't expecting it...."

"So they could be infected...." potentially worse than poison. Wonderful. He considered medical treatment, but aside from the stress of an exam, what could a doctor offer that his own people couldn't match? If something were wrong, Catherine and Al would probably know it before it showed in the blood work.

Sara, as usual, was anticipating him. "They were both gloved and gowned, but yeah. When we're finished here, I'm heading over to Catherine's for another blood sample. Just to make sure. Here." She held out a syringe in its sterile packet. "And this, too." She put a bottle of watered-down Gatorade and a cellophane packet of crackers in his other hand. "Anything else?"

"No. This is good. Thanks. Where's Cory?"

"I sent him to go get your car and bring it around to the door. If you hadn't called for an ambulance by now, I figured you probably wouldn't."

Surprised, Grissom smiled. "Are you sure you aren't a sentinel?"

She made a face. "Thanks anyway."

Back in decontamination, Grissom offered Albert the syringe. "I assume you'd rather do this yourself?"

"Sara said it was bacterial?" There was nothing at all wrong with Albert's hearing.

"Maybe."

"I want a look at the sample." He took the swab Grissom offered (concentrated vinegar, not alcohol), wiped own arm, and inserted the needle without flinching.

"Not today. Not until we've tested for sentinel-specific antagonists and micro-toxins." That got him a dirty look, but no protest. Grissom took the full syringe and exchanged it for the Gatorade. Al made a face and drank. "Crackers?"

"Yuck. Not yet." He handed the bottle back.

"Ready to go?"

"Yeah."

Grissom retrieved the damp cane from the floor and held it out. Steadied the chair as Albert heaved to his feet. Waited the second it took for him to find his balance. "All right?"

"All right."

Part 4: Sara

Since his gloves were coated in old egg salad and damp coffee grounds, Nick scratched his nose on his shoulder. "You could help," he said, scowling at Sara.

"No, I couldn't. I don't know what the suspect smelled like." She shrugged innocently and tapped her nose. "Poor, pathetic normal that I am." She waved a clip board. "Anyway, I'm doing my share."

Warrick, heaving another garbage bag onto the counter, winced. "Oh, *god*, be glad you're average. I think this one's rancid milk." He picked up a box knife and slit the bag. Both Warrick and Nick staggered backwards. "Oh, man!"

Even Sara was wincing. Damn. "Take it easy, guys. You know what you're looking for. You don't need to be smelling anything that's not your target. Focus."

"Uh, oh," Nick said, reaching past Warrick to brush some of the garbage aside. "Here we go."

"Mine," Warrick protested, but he was still flinching back from the stench. "Hey, go back to your own bag."

Nick held up a shoe. "We have a winner. And there's blood."

Sara grabbed a bag and gingerly held it out. "You found it, you document it."

"It was his bag," Nick said, laughing. He'd document, though. A sentinel on the case wasn't worth anything without a paper trail, at least according to Grissom. Never mind that juries were inclined to believe sentinels. In Las Vegas, every piece of evidence had its own set of properly filed forms. "Here's the other one. No blood on this one."

Greg poked his head in the door. "Did you hear?" he asked. "They think they've IDed the culprit in last night's morgue catastrophe. It's a strep bacteria-- fasciitis necroticans."

Warrick and Nick looked up. "It's what?"

Sara frowned. She knew what he'd said, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense. "Flesh eating bacteria? You're kidding."

Greg shrugged. "Nope. The world gets weirder every day."

Damn. They hadn't disinfected Catherine and Doc Robbins, just washed them. The stench of rot and something extraordinarily dangerous that they couldn't *quite* identify. She could see how that would have taken two sentinels down. But a bacterial infection, that wasn't anything the CSI guides had any experience with. This could be very bad. "Are we looking at an outbreak?" she asked.

"Probably not. It's hard to contract," Greg said. "And their last CBCs came back fine. The real question is how did they find it on the inside of a body? Usually, it takes hold in an open wound or laceration of some kind."

"Wow," Nick muttered. "How do you like that for a murder method?"

Greg nodded sagely. "That, my friends, is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. But I've got a better one: what if it's just a new health hazard?"

Leaving them to picture public panic over that, Greg ambled off down the hall. Sara sighed and got back to work. It took half an hour to check through the rest of the bag that had produced the shoes and then clean up the mess. The shoes, they sent to trace. The rest was finally garbage.

As Sara was bagging a set of damp receipts they had plucked from the bag, Warrick suddenly said, "Who's that with Grissom?"

Sara looked up, but didn't see anything. That was the problem with working with sentinels; they could make out faces through four or five sets of windows or see a reflection in a scalpel across the room. They lived in a slightly different world, filled with things other people couldn't see or hear or smell.

"Where?" Nick asked. "Oh. Wow. Is that--?"

"Oh, yeah," Warrick said.

Sara slapped him lightly on the back of the head with her wrist. "Who? Where?"

"Lady Heather," Nick said.

"Oh, yeah," Warrick said.

"Who?" Sara asked. Then she remembered. "Where? Really?"

Slowly, they turned to look at her. Pointedly. For several seconds.

"Oh, no," she said. "No. I am not his mother. I'm not even his guide. Technically."

They kept on looking at her. If they'd been the least bit amused, she would have cheerfully flipped them off and gotten back to work. They didn't look amused. They looked worried.

"Right," she said, and, stripping off her gloves, headed out into the hall.

Catherine, charging around the corner just as Sara came out, caught Sara's arm and hustled her forward. "Perfect. Much better you than me. The last thing they need is another sentinel in the room."

Sara dug in her heels and tried to pull away. "No. You know what? This is ridiculous."

Catherine changed directions slightly and towed Sara toward the wall. She was managing acoustics, using the shape of the building's dead spots and the white noise generators to conceal their conversation from the other sentinels. Her mastery of sound was nearly instinctive--or at least that was the word Sara would have used if Grissom didn't ban 'instinct' as mystification that obscured concrete descriptions. "Now is not the time to argue," she hissed. "Now is the time to get your ass in his office and back him up."

"He doesn't need me," Sara answered. "He doesn't need help. This is Grissom we're talking about. Against any sentinel or any guide, I'd bet on him."

"So would I. But she's both. And while Grissom isn't good with people, she is."

Right. Lady Heather made a very good living as what could politely be described as an exotic sex therapist. And putting it that way was...was being _very_ polite. Her job was playing with people's heads just as much as it was about playing with other...body parts. Grissom was smart and perceptive and compassionate. He could be inordinately astute with suspects and victims. But despite all of that, he really wasn't good with people, particularly when it was personal. The raw talent that could have made him brilliant interpersonally had focused on chemistry and entomology and post mortem decay instead. People could be overwhelming for sentinels, if they didn't get the training or support to learn to deal with them. Whatever his potential might have been, Grissom...wasn't in Lady Heather's class. Sara had to concede that he might be in trouble.

So, unhappy and pissed, Sara headed toward her boss's office. The door was open. There was no point in thinking up a pretext for stopping by; Sara had never gotten the hang of lying to police sentinels. There wasn't any point in trying. Instead, she walked in cheerfully and said, "Hi."

Grissom was perched against the edge of his desk, talking to striking dark-haired woman in sun glasses who looked very relaxed and comfortable in the visitor's chair.

Grissom turned his head to look at Sara as she came in. "I don't believe you've met," he said calmly. "Ms. Sidle. Heather Kessler."

made her grin bigger and stepped forward, "Do you shake hands....Ms. Kessler." A lot of sentinels didn't. Making a fuss about it--especially for a guide, who should take it all in stride--was very rude.

Unruffled, Lady Heather held out a hand and shook firmly. "Heather, please. How do you do?"

"Nice to meet you," a lie, and both sentinels would know it, but that was the point. "So, what brings you here? Visiting?"

"I'm here to report a crime."

"Oh. Well, the police station is down the hall, through the double doors, take the second left and--"

Quietly, Grissom said, "Sit down, Sara. You need to hear this." He turned to Heather. "Please, start again."

Heather folded her hands and sat back in the chair. "One of my clients." She removed the sunglasses, revealing a swelling bruise under her left eye. "First engagement. He came as a referral."

"From whom?" Grissom asked.

Evenly, with calm eye-contact, she said, "Some of my less reputable clients, I admit. Employees of the federal government."

"What kind of federal employment?" Grissom pressed.

"Discreet federal employment."

He let the stonewall stand. "Go on."

"He used a squawk on me." At that, Sara winced. A squawk was a sound emitter, painfully loud, but usually at a frequency far enough above normal hearing that only sentinels were affected. "I've seen homemade ones. This wasn't. It was very small and very effective. He used it correctly and moved very fast." She held up a hand, pushing back the sleeve of her patchwork jacket to reveal a single, neat ligature mark. "Before I recovered, I was restrained."

Sara swallowed, feeling slightly sick. "Um. Heather. I...I really do sympathize. No means no, and justice.... I accept that you were the victim of a crime. But you must realize how difficult it would be to get a conviction."

"She's not here to get a conviction," Grissom said, his eyes narrowing.

"The man who attacked me is a guide. He's looking to hurt sentinels."

Sara wished she could conceal her surprise and doubt. "How do you know?"

"He said so."

Sara hesitated. It was hard to picture, a guide looking to hurt sentinels. Not just anybody could be a guide. Most schools weeded out the bad seeds even before accepting them for the program.

Heather saw the doubt. "It's not unheard of for taste to...fixate on sentinels. But amateurs fixated on sentinels aren't hard to spot. People who don't have direct experience tend to lack subtlety. They think they're being delicate, but they overplay. He also paraphrased Lyons."

"What's Lyons?" Sara asked.

"In the early 80s, Jay Lyons wrote a very popular book on sentinel sexual dysfunction." Grissom answered.

"I've never heard of it," Sara said.

"Well, he was wrong about practically everything. It was discredited pretty quickly."

Heather nodded. She was looking at Grissom. "Some of Lyons...was ugly."

Grissom nodded sadly. "Go on," he said.

"I'm afraid I don't have much more that you could use. He didn't get very far. He was in my Dominion. I have...contingency plans. I broke his wrist, but he managed to get away." She produced a stiff strip of leather about two feet long. There was some blood on it. Physical evidence. "This is the sort of thing you want. I'm sorry there's not more."

Grissom flinched a little. "I'm not," he said. "Better he get away than finish."

"He's not finished," she said.

And now Sara understood. "That's why you're here."

"He was...very competent. Probably, he'll run. But he might still be here, in your city. Las Vegas has fewer sentinels than most cities this size, but it has enough. And sentinels are notoriously fragile."

"We need a description," Sara said, counting on sentinel memory. "We can call a composite artist--"

Heather took a folded paper from her purse and passed it to Grissom as she stood up. "If you find him, I'll file charges," she said. "That might slow him down."

"Thank you," he said.

"Good luck."

Grissom passed the drawing to Sara and escorted his guest out of the sensitive area. When he returned, she was still sitting on the lab stool, looking at the drawing.

"Check around, see what you can do with that," Grissom said.

"I don't need to. This came across my desk two days ago. An ex-CIA guide working for a police station in Washington State went berserk after being fired for negligence. He tried to murder his former partner."

Grissom blinked. "You're kidding."

"I'm not creative enough to make this up," she said, but she understood the response. The idea that a guide, a _guide_ , could turn on his former partner was chilling. "They made the arrest, but last week he escaped custody and disappeared. This is his picture."

It was both bad news and good news. They had a psycho on their hands, that was the bad news. They had a concrete reason to go after the perp who'd attacked Heather Kessler because they had something to nail him with when they caught him. That was the good news. "Take Warrick and head over to Lady Heather's Dominion. A guide who used to work with the police isn't going to leave any trace, but we have to try. And get me a copy of the sheet you got."


	2. Part 2

Chapter Two

May 1996

Sara poked her head into Grissom's office. "You wanted to see me?"

Grissom shut the file he was working on and laid it aside. "If you have a few minutes. Shut the door." He looked serious. Also, he was giving her his full, focused attention. Curious, she took the chair across from him. "I need a favor," he said cautiously.

Sara shrugged. "Sure. Anything."

Grissom smiled thinly. "Don't make any promises yet. It's not a trivial favor."

"Oh." She tried to match his seriousness, tried to quash the little voice at the back of her head that was so, so pleased that he would ask her for something. "Okay. What is it?"

He passed a flier across the desk. Sara glanced down. An entomology conference in Seattle. "It's this Friday," Grissom said. "I'd like to go, but I need a guide."

He was watching her expectantly. It almost seemed as though he was asking her, but that didn't make any sense. Grissom didn't take a guide with him when he traveled. He didn't need any help. And even if he did, his current guide wouldn't refuse to go along. Cory, like every guide that passed through Grissom's life, adored him. Sara winced, "Do I want to ask what he did?"

He blinked at her in puzzlement. "What who did?"

"Cory." She hefted the flier. "Why isn't he--?"

"This isn't about Cory. This is about me." He hesitated. "Cory is a very good student." He glanced away. "I need a guide."

"For a trip to a professional conference." She was careful not to sound disbelieving, but she was confused. It couldn't be that simple. On the job, Grissom went (practically alone, since you couldn't really believe that his students were any help at all) places most other sentinels wouldn't even consider: rank places, poisoned places, blindingly chaotic places.... He wouldn't ask for a guide at a bug conference.

"I'll be flying. I don't usually. It's...a problem."

Admitting even that much weakness seemed difficult. Sara offered a gentle out: "Well, that's fairly common."

He ignored the reassurance and continued briskly, "You're not scheduled to work this weekend, so you're free for Friday and Saturday, and I can shuffle things so that someone takes your shift on Sunday night."

Oh, boy. This was weird. Or, rather, not weird if it were anyone else, but way out of character for Gil Grissom. Sara ran her teeth over her lower lip. "You know--you know I'm happy to do it, right? I mean you have only to ask--"

"But?"

Sara winced and said in one breath, "I can't take on this kind of responsibility without legal authority. You're talking about going out of state. If something bad happens it won't be Desert Palms where they know us. And if you *were* to get into trouble--"

He stopped the stream of words with a raised hand and passed her a laminated card the size of a drivers' license. On one side was Sara's picture, name, and professional affiliation. It was just like the cards she had for Warrick, Catherine, Nick, Greg, and Anna, the intern. This one had Grissom's picture and signature on the back. "Oh. You've given this some thought."

He produced a folder from the desk drawer. His medical file. Sara had worked with sentinels half his age with files twice as thick. "You'll need this, too."

She took the file in both hands, but didn't open it. "Are you sure about this?"

He tried very hard to smile. "I *have* given this some thought. If I'm going to travel..." he trailed off, and glanced away, his eyes focusing on the wall behind her. "Sudden changes in pressure and altitude are very difficult for me. I can manage the symptoms, but now while, ah, not while...."

"Dealing with everything else?" she offered.

"Yes," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "But also. Recently. I've been having trouble hearing. I don't pretend this is news. I supervise five sentinels, I assume they've noticed."

Slowly, her eyes drifted down to the file in her lap. Grissom said nothing. Sara flipped it open. At the top was a hearing test less than a week old. Nothing registered below eighteen thousand kilohertz. At any volume. Her breath froze.

"It comes and goes," Grissom said. "It isn't always that bad."

"We had no idea it was..." Sara tromped down on her horror and cleared her throat. "What are the characteristics of the lacunae?"

For just a moment his eyes shown with approval before his expression returned to neutral. "I'm functionally deaf about thirty percent of the time. But I don't think I've been much past the normal human auditory range in...at least a month."

"I see." Grissom's file was, naturally, organized according to protocol. Every page was in place. She had no trouble finding the diagnosis. "Isn't this treatable?" she asked.

"A local anesthetic is out of the question, and there are certain...liability issues with using a general on a sentinel."

She started to rise. "Oh, I'll give them liability--"

"It's all right. My lawyer is working on it. Thank you."

She snapped the file closed. "Sorry," she said. "I got off track. Is there anything else I need to know? Before I travel with you? You said you got airsick?"

"I can handle the symptoms. You just have to make sure I get on the right planes." He smiled, his unguarded gratitude making Sara feel slightly guilty that he had doubted her willingness to go. But it was never that. She couldn't even consider refusing him.

"Right." She shrugged. "Piece of cake. All in a day's work."

"I appreciate this, Sara."

"No problem." She smiled brightly. "So. Seattle."

"With a brief side-trip to Cascade."

Oh. "The Brackett case."

"I have some more questions," he said casually. "Since we'll be in the neighborhood anyway, it seemed an efficient use of time." If she hadn't known him very well, it would have seemed like a detached, professional interest.

"It's an unusual case," she said, trying for casual as well. Grissom didn't respond, and after a few moments she added, "With good reason. I mean, not just anybody can go to guide school. They just don't graduate that many psychos." He didn't answer that either, so she said, "Not that all guides are perfect...."

Finally, finally, he said, "Arguably, there's a difference between being a little controlling and deliberately exposing your partner to a life-threatening chemical trigger." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "What must it be like, to know your partner would do that?"

"I don't know. I don't get it." She said sadly. "Of course, I don't get a lot of stuff that passes through here. Some of the things I *know* people have done just...turns my stomach. Although....Technically, they weren't partnered at the time. From what I could tell, Brackett was negligent but not abusive before he was fired."

His eyes snapped up. "How long would you have to be separated from Nick or Warrick before you'd poison one of them?" he asked softly. "How angry would you have to be? To take what you knew about their weaknesses and turn it against them?"

"Never. You know that--" She shoved down raw memories of ambulance rides with Warrick. Three in the last two years. "Never." But while Grissom looked upset, he didn't look upset with her. She reran his last statement in her mind and took her best guess. "Gerard disagreed with you. And, yeah, he sold out. But that doesn't mean it was personal."

His eyes iced over. "You think I have a problem because Phillip disagreed with me?" His voice had iced over, too. Sara had missed something important.

"I know you have a problem," she backtracked. "I don't know what it is."

"It seems an odd coincidence," he said, "That Haviland's lawyer knew to speak very softly and look just enough to the side that I couldn't read his lips."

Sara had been there. And, oh, yes something had been wrong. Not just to Sara's guide's eyes, but to Catherine and Nick too. Both of them had been bristling, nearly hissing with wariness. Their gaze had ranged the courtroom, searching for the threat they couldn't identify. When it was over, she'd been distracted by the victory, and in the months since she'd forgotten. But now, looking back, she could see that something this nasty could easily have been going on, right under their noses.

"This is where you're supposed to ask me if I have any evidence, or if this is all just paranoid supposition," Grissom prompted.

Will that make you feel better? She thought. But even if it would, she wasn't sure denying this truth would be good for him. Whatever the truth actually was. "You spoke with Gerard several times. You went to dinner. Was there any sign--?"

Grissom sighed. "I knew he was angry. I knew he was unhappy with his career. I knew he was resentful. I didn't know it was directed at me."

Sara had never had to call Grissom on lying to himself before. Possibly, nobody had had to do that in years. Probably, even. She wasn't willing to go that far now. But she couldn't just leave it unquestioned at all. "You're the best interrogator I've ever seen. How can you not know?"

"Sara, when I have a witness or a suspect across the table from me, he has only one thing on his mind. Usually, it's the case, and on the rare occasions that it's not...it doesn't take long to sort things out. What they're hiding, what they did, what they know--getting to that is difficult, but not complicated. But when I'm having a conversation with someone," he shrugged helplessly. "People don't have one thing on their minds. They have dozens. In casual conversations, people say things they don't mean. They tell white lies. They talk without thinking things through. They worry about their kids or their oil leak or the health of their Aunt Hattie. If I though every person who was angry *near* me was angry *at* me, I would be the most paranoid person you could possibly imagine."

"You knew he was unhappy. You had no idea he'd use your weaknesses to try to obscure the truth and publicly humiliate you."

"Yes," he breathed. He collected himself. "Never mind. You'll be relieved to know I've already decided not to do that."

She smiled. "What? Sell out? Hate to burst your bubble, but nobody was worried about that."

"No. Not to hate you when you surpass me."

And what did you say to that? "Thank you. Er."

"You're already a better guide than I am, Sara. You actually are patient, where I just fake patience."

"Patience is a behavior, not an attitude," she said automatically.

"I teach that because I don't have the attitude, and being in the wrong frame of mind is no excuse for not giving things the time they need. But. You...are very gifted. And your greatest skills aren't ones you learned from me. Someday, you'll be a better teacher, too."

She wanted to say something humble. She knew he wouldn't respect that. And, anyway, it would be a lie. She said, "Well, I'm going to try." And, yes, that was the right answer. He smiled, and she changed the subject before she said something stupid and lost all the ground she'd just gained. "So. Do we have an appointment in Cascade?"

"Friday afternoon. We'll fly in to Cascade, meet with Detective Ellison, and head to the conference Friday evening."

"Directly from the plane to the meeting?" Sara asked. "And from there to the first round of sessions, with a commute in between? You know, I have four vacation days I have to use before the end of next month or lose them. And I bet you have more than that. We could take Thursday night off and fly up early. Take some time to actually sleep."

"I can *do* it, Sara." He flicked a finger at the file in her lap. "I'm not fragile."

Sara scooted to the edge of the chair and leaned across the desk. "Yeah. See. Just because I *could* work you until you drop from exhaustion doesn't mean I have to. And, you know. I have this whole professional ethics thing going."

He was hesitating. She almost had him. And she needed to win this one, because there was no way she wanted to work with Grissom exhausted and sick and in some strange city. "Besides which, my supervisor has recently expressed great confidence in my ability. I don't want to blow this. Particularly since he'll be watching my performance very closely."

"Okay," he said, smiling slightly. "No promises, but I'll see what I can do with the schedule."

Whew. "Great. Let me know when we're traveling, and I'll call for the tickets." She stood up, trying for brisk and efficient. She might make a graceful exit here. Usually, with Grissom, she didn't.

He wasn't ready for professional just yet. He looked up at her solemnly and said, "Thank you. I appreciate this."

"You're kidding, right? I would love to hear this story first hand--" But, no. It was no good pretending this was no big deal or just a matter of professional curiosity. "We'll be okay," she promised, coming around the desk so that he could clearly smell her, pick up her body heat. Grissom had asked for a guide. He was senior to her and much more experienced, but it was about to be her job to reassure and protect him. "It'll be fine."

"Thank you for that, too," he said.

Sara withdrew, thinking that she would have to check the weather and make plans for packing. They were going to Washington.

***

Chapter Three

May 1996

Grissom was tall enough to have found the aisle seat more physically comfortable. If being comfortable had been an option at all. The foul, recycled air, the punishing vibration, the constant changes in air pressure and angle--comfortable wasn't possible. Grissom had retreated to the window seat and tried not to think about how glad he was that Sara was between him and everyone else on the plane.

Ever since they'd processed a body in the aisle of the first-class cabin of Las Vegas Air flight 909, Grissom had been having nightmares about being delirious and in pain and murdered by the other passengers in a panicked frenzy. He'd had the nightmare exactly four times, but he couldn't tell himself it was just a bad dream. Tony Candlewell had really died.

But then, Tony Candelwell had been alone. Sara was seated on the aisle, leaving the middle seat open between them. For the first part of the flight, the extra space had helped stave off the sensation of claustrophobia--a physical reaction to cramped quarters and an absence of normal scents and air movement, not an emotional anxiety--but now she seemed very far away. Before he could stop himself, he reached out and took her hand.

The seatbelt light was on, but she undid hers and slid into the middle seat anyway. "Hey? You okay?" she said.

He couldn't hear her. Even the vibration of her voice was lost in the pounding of the engines. Grissom held himself very still. He was uncomfortable, but he was safe. He wasn't sick. He could think clearly. He didn't have to make any decisions or solve any problems--that was what he'd brought a guide for. The fear he was feeling was baseless. He was overtired and overwhelmed, and yes, that caused a fear response, but he could handle it.

Sara pushed the call button and then squirmed around to say something over her shoulder.

"I'm okay," he said, belatedly. Probably too loudly.

She squeezed the hand she was still holding. "I know. Just another half hour or so. It'll all be over soon."

The flight attendant appeared with a squat glass of something that smelled like carbonated water. Sara placed it in his free hand, then fished a small chunk of ginger candy from a baggy in her pocket. She dropped it into his drink. "Sip. And don't eat the candy," she said.

It was Sara who found baggage claim, and then their luggage. It was Sara who signed all the papers for the rental car. She navigated out of the airport and found the hotel downtown. It would have been embarrassing, being so totally useless, except sentinels couldn't afford pride. She checked them into the hotel. Found the rooms. Opened the connecting doors in between. Found the suitcase with his bedding and began to strip the bed.

This last he could have done himself, except it was a symbolic act. The guide changed the sheets. The intimacy of the gesture made Grissom uncomfortable, but it would have been the grossest of lies to take the blanket out of her hands and pretend that she was only along as a formality.

Grissom paced, not looking at Sara as she folded the hotel sheets and set them in a drawer. He was sweating, even though it wasn't hot. Also--something was wrong. He turned in a circle, his eyes searching the walls, the carpet. It looked like a hotel room. Not as flashy as some of the ones in Vegas, but clean enough.

Sara stopped his search pattern with a hand on his stomach. "What's wrong?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Is your stomach upset from the flight?"

"No," he gasped. And then, "I can't breathe." The air was thick and heavy. It tasted...off. And there wasn't enough of it. Not nearly enough. Panting didn't help. He panted harder.

Unruffled, Sara put an arm around his waist and led him to the tiny balcony. They were eight floors up with a view of the blue bay. It looked invitingly open, and his mind thought, 'yes, right,' as she opened the door and guided him out--

Into worse. Much worse. The air here was bitter and almost gooey. Even as he staggered back into the room, he was frantically running through airborne toxins, accidental and deliberate. "There's been a spill," he gasped. "Or an attack. We have to inform the authorities."

"What--? Gris!"

"There's something in the air." He started toward the phone.

"What? No. What do you smell?"

Sara was no help. How badly was he exposed? How concentrated did the exposure have to be before normals began to feel it? How many people were at risk? Only thousands? Or hundreds of thousands?

Sara caught his forearms and shook him once. "Stop," she said.

He stopped. He didn't have the strength to fight her. He was dizzy and off balance. He couldn't breathe.

She pulled him hard by one arm and snagged the desk chair with her free hand. Grissom stumbled and lost his balance. He landed on the chair, Sara's hands pushing him forward into the stream of the air conditioning unit, which she snapped to high. She was talking, and he could hear her, but the words didn't register in his mind.

The cold in his face helped a little, and the horrible smothering sensation was not nearly as bad. Sara squatted beside him, one hand trying to sooth the rigid muscles of his shoulders. He managed enough coherence to say the important thing. "There's an airborne contaminant. We have to call somebody."

"No. There isn't. You're reacting to the change in air."

"Sara--"

"We've lost a couple of thousand feet in altitude, and we're near the water. The humidity is nearly one hundred percent. And then there's the salt."

"No. The air--"

"It's fine. But you got overwhelmed on the plane and you've been restless since we left the airport. You're used to very dry air, either very hot or very cold, not this muggy crap they're hardly bothering to air condition."

That couldn't be it. Grissom didn't make this kind of mistake. "No."

"Yes," she said softly. "I've seen you sick. Okay, it was once. But this isn't you sick."

Grissom closed his eyes. The air on his face was bitingly cold now. It was light. And normal. He buried his face in his hands. "I can't believe I had an uptake distortion response to water vapor. That's...going to look lovely in my file." He tried to make a joke of it, sighed inwardly as it fell flat.

Sara slid her arm around his shoulders. He wished it was a friendly gesture, but she was being strictly professional. His guide, offering comfort. Because he needed it. "I wouldn't call it that. Your perceptions just got thrown off. You were disoriented from the flight. Sentinels aren't built for fast altitude or time changes. Some can't fly at all."

He sighed.

"Headache?"

He nodded.

She disappeared and returned with an aspirin and a bottle of watered down sports drink. The core was still frozen. He took the bottle but waved the aspirin away. "It's nothing. I hyperventilated." He tried to smile. "As though this weren't already embarrassing enough. If you'd just let me pass out, I'm sure I would have been a lot easier to manage."

Her left eyebrow quirked. "Nice. Is that your professional evaluation, Boss?"

Embarrassed, he looked away.

"Right," she said, "I've seen you work with Catherine. You're a model of patience. With much bigger prima dona crap than this."

"Catherine's not that bad," he said automatically.

Sara snorted.

"She was a late bloomer. In her twenties before she came on line. It's not easy...."

"Right. And flying's not easy. And you've been under a lot of stress. So. Knock it off?" Her hand was back on his shoulder, offering a vivid input that was familiar and unthreatening. (Oh, a danger, yes that: so beautiful and so smart and so *young* and working for him. A danger, but not a threat. She wouldn't hurt or abandon a partner she was guiding. ) She washed her hair in yucca soap, and her conditioner was aloe. She smelled like airplane, which was harsh, but under that she smelled like the lab. Home.

It was an effort not to turn his face into her shoulder and hide.

"You need to shower," she said. "And maybe eat?"

Right, that was one of the nightmares, wasn't it? A sentinel who stopped eating? She was thinking like a guide. "Yeah, I should eat." He got up, found his legs steady, retrieved a towel and a change of clothes from his suitcase. "Order something from room service. It doesn't matter what."

She followed him to the bathroom door. "It doesn't matter what?" she repeated. "You're just going to eat what turns up?"

He shrugged casually. "Sure. I...don't feel like making a decision. Whatever you pick will be fine."

He shut the door between them, turned the water, and sank down onto the closed toilet seat.

***

Sara was sitting on the second bed when he came out. She was reading a forensics journal. She put it down as he came out and watched as he put his dirty clothes in the plastic bag that kept his things carefully segregated.

"So I ordered sandwiches and soup," she said.

He nodded to show he had heard.

"You're not testing me, are you?"

He looked up, astonished and a little horrified. "Of course not." He looked into her eyes, searching for hurt or resentment. He couldn't make sense of her expression or scent. "Your competence was never in doubt." He hoped that was enough. It was the truth. He'd brought her in two years before as--well, very nearly as a last hope. One of his sentinels had been in a downward spiral that showed no signs of ending well. Warrick had alienated his guide and his supervisor. He was engaging in progressively more destructive behaviors. Any hope Grissom had had of dealing with the problem himself evaporated when Brass got transferred and Grissom found himself supervising all the sentinels and all the guides and the assistant supervisor for everything else. He'd had no time, he'd had no ideas, and he hadn't even had a guide on staff he could leave in charge of a crime scene in a pinch. And then he'd gotten Sara. And she'd been capable. Despite Warrick's resentment, she'd had him straightened out and showing up on time--and doing reliable work--in two weeks. After two years of excellent work...why did he think he would question her now?

She nodded slowly. "Right. You're not testing me. You're testing you." She waved her hand at the room service menu. "You're trying to figure out if you can handle having a guide."

"I always work with a guide," he protested.

"No, you work with students. You haven't actually needed a guide in, what? Ten, fifteen years?"

He didn't answer that. Admitting it would sound like bragging.

She sat up, folding her feet under her, and laid her hands in her lap. "So you're not considering the possibility that you're going to need a real guide and testing me out to see if you can work with me. You're trying to figure out if you can work with anyone at all. If you can trust someone to order food or get you out of an airport."

"Maybe. Yeah."

"You didn't have to come all the way down here to do that."

"We came down here to go to a conference and get some more information on an ongoing case."

"Right," she said, nodding.

Slowly, Grissom approached the bed and sat on the edge. She said nothing, didn't rush him. He appreciated that. "I guess you've already noticed that I'm absolutely terrified."

She nodded slowly. "Yeah. Kinda. But you've already noticed that I have weird issues with authority, so I think we're probably even."

Ruthlessly, he forced himself to drag the truth into the open. "I never wanted you to be my guide. I wanted...so many other things." He looked up, hoping she understood, wanting her to understand. Put this way it sounded like a rejection, but he couldn't put words to what was impossible now.

Sara was nodding sadly. "Yeah? I didn't think you'd decided yet."

"I was taking things slowly."

"Heh. Grissom, you were into glacial time. I know rock formations that moved more quickly than you did."

"I wanted...I wanted something solid. I thought there was plenty of time. Well. Enough time."

"Ah. That would have been nice." She turned her eyes away. "I couldn't understand why suddenly you wanted nothing to do with me."

"Sara. I." What could he say? I couldn't risk you noticing what I didn't want to think about? I was scared and I couldn't think clearly? I suddenly realized that I didn't have a damn thing to offer you? "I'm sorry I hurt you."

She closed her eyes. He smelled tears and felt vaguely ill. "Sara, I can't. I can't. It's taking all I've got just to keep things together--"

"I know. I know. You need a guide a lot more than you need a prom date."

"If the surgery doesn't come through soon, I'm going to need a very, very good guide."

"The old fashioned kind, who watches your back in a dangerous world," she said.

"Yeah." He took a deep breath. "You want the job?"

"I'll take it, if it comes to that," she said. "But you're not there yet. I've been looking into medical tourism."

He considered that. "Eastern Europe? No, thank you."

She snorted. "*Hell,* no, thank you," she corrected. "They don't know what to do with sentinels in Eastern Europe. Canada, although we might run into liability issues there. India is probably the best bet. They have excellent care there, for people who can afford it. And nobody beats India for sentinel medicine."

And wasn't that a thought. Damn. India? And flying to Washington had been bad.

He was going deaf. It was a matter of months, now. Much longer, and it would be too late to do anything about it.

"Food's here," he said getting up several seconds before the knock at the door.

"You heard it?" Sara asked.

"Smelled the soup."

The sandwiches were grilled cheese and turkey club (no bacon). The soups were tomato and broccoli cheese. As he set the dishes on the room's tiny table, Grissom said, "I assume the club is for me?"

"I can pick the turkey off, if you want the grilled cheese."

"No, this is fine."

Sitting at the table, they were closer together then they'd been on the bed. It was awkward, though it shouldn't have been. It had been a long time since they'd been alone together without being in the middle of a case. Without evidence to talk about...what was left was both personal and unpleasant.

The sandwich was flat and tasteless. The cheese soup was all salt and fat. More than a few spoonfuls of the soup and he'd be sick, so it would have to be the sandwich. "Sometimes food is wonderful, but mostly, the purpose of food is to be nutrition." He realized he was quoting his mother. She'd always been practical about food. She'd understood the days when taste was off the scale and nothing seemed to appetizing. Certainly, she'd lived through enough of them herself. But like it or not, you still had to eat.

Sara pushed the tomato soup closer. "We can switch," she offered.

Warrick and Nick ate after her all the time. Not all sentinels would do that, and it was as unsanitary as hell, but there was no point in pretending that they weren't completely cross contaminated anyway. Guides stood close enough to breathe the same air, and there was a lot of touching. "Nick and Warrick aren't going to be happy," he said, cautiously dipping his spoon into the tomato soup.

"I think they'd rather see a lot less of me than not see you at all."

"Will they be all right?" He tasted the tomato soup. It was better, but sweeter then he'd like.

She shrugged. "Nick can work with practically anybody these days, but you can't give Warrick to some new graduate. He needs somebody who won't back down."

Another bite of soup. "Holly couldn't do some filling in--?"

She snorted. "Yeah, dream on. One, Catherine would kill you if you cut down on her time with *her* guide and, two, Holly is a marshmallow. Warrick would run all over her. So would Nick."

And that was true. Catherine steamrolled her sweet little guide, but Catherine made good decisions in the field, so that wasn't actually a problem. "Damn. It's hard to find a good guide who can also document evidence." Forensic sentinels were rare, but much more common than cross-trained guides. And Grissom's department already had more then its fair share.

Sara smiled and shook her head.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing. You. It's always about the lab with you."

He nodded. "Right."

Half the sandwich and most of the soup were left, but he couldn't force down any more. He pushed the plate away and drained the last of the sports drink that Sara had brought in the backpack. All the ice had melted and it was lukewarm.

She reached out and laid a hand on his arm. "Whatever happens--you'll still be the same person," she said gently.

He had known she was a hard science girl to the core, but really, Grissom had assumed she'd paid enough attention to the anthropology in guide school to know better than that. "No," he said, "I won't. What you're trying to say is, not being a whole sentinel doesn't mean I won't be a whole person."

Her eyes got big. She whiffed embarrassment and worry. "Right. You've thought about this."

"I've been thinking about this since I was in grade school. If I... when I...I'll be in another world. It's a valid world. A world with a lot to offer. But it won't be the same. I won't be the same."

She was a squall of emotions now. He smelled uncertainty and pain. He couldn't guess what she was thinking, or what he might say to comfort her. "No more interrogations," he said. "And I won't be able to guide in the field." Not if he couldn't ever turn his back on his partner.

"You'll still be the best bug guy in the world. You'll still be gifted with spatter patterns and prints. You can still teach."

"Can I? Can I really put *any* of my people in the hands of a student when I can't be sure I'll be able to back them up?"

"And hearing it is the only way to know about a problem? It's not even your best way. No. I've seen you work."

"Maybe," he conceded. "I don't know." He began to gather the used dishes. They'd have to go into the hall, or in an hour the smell would be completely unbearable.

"Do you think you could sleep?" Sara asked.

"I'm not sure I should, yet. The weekend is going to happen on normal time."

She nodded. "Up to you. If you're all right by yourself, I thought I'd take a walk, pick up some bottled water, some soda."

"Did you want company?" he asked.

"Ah, not really," she said.

Trying to be discreet, Grissom sniffed her. No anger, which was good. Not particularly sad, either. A little fear, but no more then he himself would have if he'd just agreed to partner with a sentinel facing either profound disability or a surgical anesthetic he had a fifteen percent chance of not surviving. "Let me know when you get back."

"I'll come check on you."

He sat for a long time after she left, watching the afternoon sun cast shadows across the floor, reminding himself how pointless it was to wish things were different.


End file.
